Adam Begley: Ghostbuster

If you haven't yet woken up to the beauty of Don DeLillo's sentences, here's your chance. His new novel, ''The Body Artist,'' is a tiny, intimate affair, quiet, spare and strange -- but not so strange as to distract from the glories of the chiseled prose. If that sounds precious, or if your daily life is already too crammed with exquisite beauty, then you can afford to dismiss this pamphlet-sized book that looks and feels like an elegant, weightless gesture.

Don DeLillo weightless? Unthinkable, especially after ''Underworld,'' the magnificent 827-page postwar panorama he published four years ago, which set in stone his reputation as a vastly ambitious literary novelist unafraid of challenging his readers, of making us work. He'd done it before: in his rambling, overstuffed debut, ''Americana'' (1971); in ''Ratner's Star'' (1976), a sci-fi teaser for the mathematically inclined; in ''The Names'' (1982), with its cryptic mystery cult and long, philosophy-of-art dialogues; and most successfully in ''Libra'' (1988), his reconstruction of John F. Kennedy's assassination, a book at once historically immaculate and fiercely imaginative, a book that tests both our knowledge of the Warren Commission report and our willingness to live inside the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald. In ''Underworld,'' DeLillo went out of his way to rub our noses in other smelly bits of our recent history: the Bomb and the fear it bred, and our ''waste stream,'' the ''mountained garbage'' we produce.

Maybe you've already guessed that ''The Body Artist'' is not weightless after all. A metaphysical ghost story about a woman alone and not alone in a large rented seaside house, the novel invests the simplest domestic detail with a heavy burden of significance. Breakfast in the kitchen, the virtuoso first scene, expands in space and time, each showcased moment stretching to eternity, every movement -- the shaking of the juice carton -- seismic. The dailiness is at once inconsequential and eloquent, vast and dense. In just 124 pages, DeLillo finds room to ponder large themes: how we structure time and are structured by it; how we express grief or fail to express it; how an artist makes sense, or not, of calamity; and the equivocal role language plays in all of this.

Breakfast is with Lauren Hartke, a 36-year-old ''body artist'' and her husband, Rey Robles, a 64-year-old film director. Turn the page and there's an obituary; turn the page again and the newly widowed Lauren is back in the big old house, on her own now, faced with an impossible question: ''Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin?''

What little plot there is in ''The Body Artist'' begins to unfold when Lauren discovers, in an unused room on the empty third floor of her house, a man who may or may not have been there all along: ''He was smallish and fine-bodied and at first she thought he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe.'' This anonymous man, whom Lauren nicknames Mr. Tuttle after a high school science teacher, is in all ways mysterious. His speech is oddly scrambled, mostly nonsensical -- he muddles past and future tense. Is he autistic? An alien? A ghost? ''There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinness of physical address.''

Mr. Tuttle often talks like Gertrude Stein on a bad day: ''Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where.'' Or: ''The word for moonlight is moonlight.'' His nonsense is suspiciously suggestive, but it's nothing compared to his true talent: he has the eerie ability to speak in Lauren's voice, and in Rey's, too -- words echoing from beyond the grave.

Is this a trick, a meaningless parroting, or does it promise communication with the dead? Lauren comes to think of Mr. Tuttle as exempt from chronology, outside time's narrative: ''His future is unnamed. It is simultaneous, somehow, with the present.'' It comes as no surprise when he simply disappears. Like Rey, he is here and then gone.

Lauren fashions a performance piece. We learn about it from a profile-cum-review inserted, like Rey's obituary, into the midst of the narrative. This is also how we discover what it means to be a body artist. We've seen Lauren rehearsing, doing her ''bodywork . . . her regimen of cat stretch and methodical contortion,'' we've seen her scraping at her skin and chopping off her hair and we're told that she aims to become ''a body slate erased of every past resemblance'' -- but we still don't quite know what it all adds up to.

She's part actress, part mime, part flesh-and-bone artwork. With her body, Lauren channels other people, real or invented, young or old, male or female. It's like Mr. Tuttle speaking in Rey's voice -- except that Lauren creates illusions with artistic intent. What's she after? ''Maybe the idea is to think of time differently,'' she tells her interviewer. ''Stop time, or stretch it out, or open it up. Make a still life that's living, not painted.''

You could say that this is also DeLillo's intent in the beautiful opening breakfast chapter. This still life breathes; it makes noise, it smells. Here's Rey in the middle of the kitchen with the orange juice: ''He stood shaking the container. He shook it longer than he had to because he wasn't paying attention . . . and because it was satisfying in some dumb and blameless way, for its own childlike sake, for the bounce and slosh and cardboard orange aroma.'' (And how satisfying was it, in a less dumb but equally blameless way, for DeLillo to put together those last three words, ''cardboard orange aroma''?) Lauren hears the birds at the feeder and tries to define their sound, ''a wing-whir that was all b's and r's, the letter b followed by a series of vibrato r's.'' She struggles to get a fix on the scent of the soya granules she sprinkles on her cereal, ''a faint wheaty stink with feet mixed in''; she zooms in closer: ''The smell of the soya was somewhere between body odor, yes, in the lower extremities and some authentic podlife of the earth, deep and seeded.'' I suspect that DeLillo wanted ''pod'' to echo ''body odor'' in a sentence that leads from the hint of decay in the smell of our own bodies to the promised regeneration of a buried seed.

DeLillo slows the reader down. All the way through, ''The Body Artist'' requires close attention to each word in each artfully made sentence. He wants to do for the reader what Mr. Tuttle does for Lauren: ''This was the effect he had, shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, words like moons in particular phases.'' Try ''shadow-inching'' through DeLillo's sentences and you'll find that most of them remind you of how meaning ticks along to the beat of ordered time, the steady march of moments into the graveyard of the past.

There he goes again, making us work. Or is it difficult, delightful play?

Lauren laughs when she listens to Mr. Tuttle's weird, patterned jumble of words: ''It came out of him nonstop and it wasn't schizophrenic speech or the whoop of rippling bodies shocked by God. . . . The words ran on, sensuous and empty, and she wanted him to laugh with her, to follow her out of herself. This is the point, yes, this is the stir of true amazement.'' Empty, unstructured language, free of time's monotonous sequence, is ''the wedge into ecstasy, the old deep meaning of the word, your eyes rolling upward in your skull.''

Ecstasy. That's a lot to ask of words, especially of words on the page. But if you respond to the poetry of DeLillo's meticulously worked prose, this novel will make you smile; if you think your way through the thematic puzzle, the convoluted notions about the grammar of language and the laws of time, it will stretch you; if you feel your way past the edges of a massive bereavement, it will dredge you. Imagine that: a stretched, dredged, smiling you.

February 4, 2001

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Frank Rich: Stuff Happens Again in Baghdad

IT'S not just about torture. Even if there had never been an Abu Ghraib, a Guantanamo or an American president determined to rewrite the Geneva Conventions, America would still be losing the war for hearts and minds in the Arab world. Our first major defeat in that war happened at the dawn of the Iraq occupation, before ''detainee abuse'' entered our language: the ''Stuff happens!'' moment at the National Museum in Baghdad.

Three and a half years later, have we learned anything? You have to wonder. As the looting of the museum was the first clear warning of disasters soon to come, so the stuff that's happening at the museum today is a grim indicator of where we're headed in Iraq: America is empowering the very Islamic radicals this war was supposed to smite. But even now we seem to be averting our eyes from reality on the ground in Baghdad.

Our blindness back in April 2003 seems ludicrous in retrospect. As the looting flared, an oblivious President Bush told the Iraqi people in a televised address that they were ''the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.'' Our actions -- or, more accurately, our inaction as the artifacts of that great civilization were carted away -- spoke louder than those pretty words. As Fred Ikle, the Reagan administration Pentagon policy chief, puts it in Thomas Ricks's ''Fiasco,'' ''America lost most of its prestige and respect in that episode.''

That disaster might have been mitigated if our leaders had not dismissed the whole episode as a triviality. But Donald Rumsfeld likened the chaos to the aftermath of a soccer game and joked that television was exaggerating the story by recycling video of a single looter with a vase. Gen. Richard Myers defended our failure to intervene as ''a matter of priorities'' (we had protected the oil ministry). Lt. Gen. William Wallace, countering a wildly inflated early claim by a former museum employee that 170,000 artifacts had been destroyed, put the number of objects still unaccounted for at ''as few as 17.'' (The actual number was closer to 14,000.)

The war's many cheerleaders in the press fell into line. In keeping with the mood of the time, administration enforcers like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld's critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq. In a column in Salon titled ''Idiocy of the Week'' (that idiot would be me), Mr. Sullivan asked rhetorically who was right about ''the alleged ransacking'' of the museum, Mr. Rumsfeld or his critics? ''Rummy, of course. He almost always is.''

Of course, dear old Rummy's what-me-worry take on the museum was the tip-off to how he would be wrong about everything that would follow: he reacted with exactly the same disdain and indifference to the insurgency happening under his own nose and to Abu Ghraib. There would be a hasty corrective to the looting, at least: a heroic Marine Reserve colonel, Matthew Bogdanos, commanded a team that ultimately tracked down a bit more than a third of the vanished objects. (It was too late to rescue tens of thousands of additional treasures in Iraq's National Library and National Archives, both also looted and torched.) But Mr. Rumsfeld's ''Stuff happens!'' proved indelible because it so resonantly set forth an enduring theme of the occupation: that the Americans in charge of Iraq were contemptuous of the local populace to whom they were so grandly bequeathing democracy and other fruits of civilization.

The cavalier American reaction to the museum looting was mimicked in the $22 billion reconstruction effort, an orgy of corruption and waste that still hasn't brought Iraqis reliable electricity. In a new account of the civilian nation-builders in the Green Zone, ''Imperial Life in the Emerald City,'' Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post details how L. Paul Bremer III and his underlings enlisted cronies and apparatchiks rather than those who might actually know anything about the country's people or their needs. Thus we saddled Iraq with Bernie Kerik, G.O.P. fund-raisers and politically connected young ideologues chosen over more qualified job applicants who knew Arabic. They saw Iraq as a guinea pig for irrelevant (and doomed) experiments, including an antismoking campaign and an elaborate American-style stock exchange. Mr. Chandrasekaran's book, while nonfiction, is as chilling an indictment of America's tragic cultural myopia as Graham Greene's prescient 1955 novel of the American debacle in Indochina, ''The Quiet American.''

Our public diplomacy efforts were equally tone-deaf to Iraqis and their neighbors. In the early going, the State Department hired a Madison Avenue whiz who made sunny TV testimonials about America's love of Muslims. These ads won no hearts or minds, but wasted tons of money and even more valuable time. Now this job belongs to Karen Hughes, the presidential flack, whose patronizing photo-op tour of the region last year earned mostly ridicule.

Our broadcasting outreach there is supervised by a longtime Karl Rove pal, Kenneth Tomlinson, who last month was found by State Department investigators to be using his office -- literally -- to run a ''horse-racing operation.'' One of Mr. Tomlinson's thoroughbreds is named Karzai, in supposed honor of the Afghan president. If that's his idea of lifting America's image in the Muslim world, he might as well be on Al Jazeera's payroll. On Wednesday, ABC News reported the bottom line of such P.R. misfires: a confidential Pentagon survey found that 75 percent of Iraq's Sunni Muslims support the insurgency, up from 14 percent in 2003.

Speaking before the United Nations last week in what may be the run-up to our new war, Mr. Bush was still on his battle-for-civilization kick, flattering Iranians much as he has the Iraqis. ''We admire your rich history, your vibrant culture, and your many contributions to civilization,'' he said. All Iranians have to do is look to the Baghdad museum today to see that such words are worth no more now than they were in 2003.

It's symbolic of the anarchy throughout Iraq's capital that the museum's entrances are now sealed with concrete to keep out new hordes of killers and thieves. But the violence, which seems to spiral with each declaration of a new security crackdown, is old news. More revealing is the other half of the museum's current plight: it is now in the hands of Iraq's version of the Taliban. That sad denouement is another symbol, standing for our defeat in the larger war of ideas.

The museum changed hands in August, when Donny George, its longtime administrator and the chairman of Iraq's official antiquities board, fled the country fearing for his life and for the treasures in his care, both at the museum and the country's many archaeological sites. Mr. George is a Christian and had good reason to fear. The new government minister placed in charge of the museum, a dentist, is an acolyte of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose goal is to make Iraq a fundamentalist theocracy. To Mr. Sadr and his followers, the museum's legendary pre-Islam antiquities, harking back to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, are infidels' idols to be sacked.

You might think, given Mr. Sadr's radicalism, that he is a fugitive terrorist on the lam as, say, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was. After all, Mr. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, is a font of death squads at the heart of the sectarian warfare; he's an enthusiastic ally of Hezbollah besides. But he is instead a major player in the ''democracy'' we have installed in Iraq, controlling at least 30 of 275 seats in the Parliament and six government ministries, including the power centers of transportation and health.

Back in 2004, the Americans made plans to take down Mr. Sadr, but as Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the coalition authority in Baghdad, writes in his book ''Squandered Victory,'' those plans were shelved for ''various reasons, including political calculations in Washington.'' American forces arrested some Sadr aides last week, but such periodic skirmishes notwithstanding, his influence continues to grow. He is a crucial ally of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, who would not be in office without his support. In the past few days, both Tony Snow and Condi Rice have been reaffirming that the administration has what the secretary of state called ''enormous confidence'' in Mr. Maliki, despite Washington chatter to the contrary.

One of the first Westerners to warn strongly of the dangers of someone like Mr. Sadr was Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), the legendary archaeologist, explorer, author and British political officer who masterminded the unlikely cobbling together of the modern Iraq state after World War I. She warned that a Shiite theocracy in the new country would be ''the very devil.'' As it happened, it was also Bell who created the Iraqi National Museum in 1923.

The fortunes of her museum, once considered the finest in the Middle East, have been synonymous with the fate of Iraq ever since. That's because, like any such national institution, it is not merely some building that houses art but a repository of a country's heart and soul. That America has stood helplessly by as Mr. Sadr folds the museum into his orbit of power is as ominous a predictor of what lies ahead in this war as was our callous reaction to the looting of 2003. For all of America's talk of stamping out a ''murderous ideology'' and promoting civilization and democracy in Iraq, we are now handing the very devil the keys.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Nicholas D. Kristof: Prudence's Struggle Ends

As Prudence Lemokouno lay on a hospital bed here, spitting blood, her breath coming in terrible rattles, it was obvious that what was killing her wasn't so much complications in pregnancy as the casual disregard for women like her across much of the developing world.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female, and so half a million such women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect.

I began Prudence's story in my column last Sunday, and for a while I thought I would have a happy ending.

Prudence, 24, was from a small village and already had three small children. As she was in labor to deliver her fourth, an untrained midwife didn't realize she had a cervical blockage and sat on Prudence's stomach to force the baby out -- but instead her uterus ruptured and the fetus died.

Prudence's family carried her to the hospital on a motorcycle, but once she was there the doctor, Pascal Pipi, demanded $100 for a Caesarian to remove the fetus. The fetus was decomposing inside her, and an infection was raging in her abdomen -- but her family had total savings of only $20, so she lay down in the maternity ward and began to die.

I arrived the next day, interviewed Dr. Pipi about maternal mortality -- and found Prudence fading away in the next room. Dr. Pipi said she needed a blood transfusion before the operation could begin, so a Times colleague, Naka Nathaniel, and I donated blood (yes, the needles were sterile) and cash.

The transfusion helped Prudence, and she grew strong enough to reach out her hand and respond to people around her. Dr. Pipi said the operation would begin promptly, and Prudence's family was ecstatic. But as we waited in the hospital lobby, Dr. Pipi sneaked out the back door of the hospital and went home for the night.

It wasn't just the doctor who failed Prudence, but the entire system. He did operate the next morning, but by then the infection had spread further -- and the hospital had no powerful antibiotics. Prudence's breathing grew strained, as her stomach ballooned with the infection and the bag of urine from her catheter overflowed. The nurses couldn't be bothered with a poor villager like her.

That night she began vomiting and spitting blood. She slipped into a coma, and a towel beside her head grew soggy with blood and vomit. On Tuesday afternoon, she finally passed away.

Intellectually, I knew that women in Africa had a 1-in-20 lifetime risk of dying in childbirth. But it was wrenching to see this young mother of three fade and die so needlessly.

There's no doubt that if men were dying at this rate, poor and rich countries alike would make the issue a priority, but the problem seems invisible, like the victims.

The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals that might have saved Prudence's life, but it doesn't operate in this region. And it's difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut U.S. funding for the population fund -- even for African programs -- because of false allegations that it supports abortions in China.

That's shameful. Two women have tried to recoup American honor by starting a group, 34 Million Friends of U.N.F.P.A., to make up the shortfall with private donations (www.34millionfriends.org).

(I discuss some of the groups active in this area at nytimes.com/ontheground, and I'll also have a link to video of Prudence.)

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health. And abortion politics have distracted all sides from what is really essential: a major aid campaign to improve midwifery, prenatal care and emergency obstetric services in poor countries. We know exactly how to save the lives of women like Prudence, partly because a few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality.

Lynn Freedman, head of the Averting Maternal Death and Disability program at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University (www.amdd.hs.columbia.edu), notes that we could provide all effective interventions for maternal and newborn health to 95 percent of the world's population for an additional $9 billion per year.

Sure, that's a lot. But think of Prudence and women like her dying in childbirth at a rate of one a minute -- and after all, the world spends $40 billion a year on pet food.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Motoko Rich: U.S. Best Seller, Thanks to Rave by Latin Leftist

All the authors currently clamoring for a seat on Oprah Winfrey’s couch might do well to send copies of their books to the latest publishing tastemaker: Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.

Ever since Mr. Chávez held up a copy of a 301-page book by Noam Chomsky, the linguist and left-wing political commentator, during a speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, sales of the book have climbed best-seller lists at Amazon.com and BN.com, the online site for the book retailer Barnes & Noble, and booksellers around the country have noted a spike in sales.

The paperback edition of “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” a detailed critique of American foreign policy that Mr. Chomsky published two years ago, hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list yesterday, and the hardcover edition, published in 2003, climbed as high as No. 6. At both Borders Group and Barnes & Noble, sales of the title jumped tenfold in the last two days.

“It doesn’t normally happen that you get someone of the stature of Mr. Chávez holding up a book at a speech at the U.N.,” said Jay Hyde, a manager at Borders Group in Ann Arbor, Mich.

In his speech, in which Mr. Chávez excoriated President George W. Bush as the “devil,” he held up a copy of “Hegemony” and urged his audience “very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it.”

Calling it an “excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century,” Mr. Chávez added, “I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.”

Julia Versau, 50, a real estate writer in Valparaiso, Ind., said she saw Mr. Chávez holding up the book during a newscast on CNN. Although she had read Mr. Chomsky’s work on propaganda at least a decade ago, she said, Mr. Chávez’s speech reminded her to try the book.

“I saw the title and I went darn, I haven’t read that one,” Ms. Versau said in a telephone interview. “If he’s reading that I better go check it out.” She said that she had previously found Mr. Chomsky’s work “a little dense,” but said that “our democracy could use more people telling the truth and more people taking the time to read and get themselves educated.”

Mr. Chomsky, who has retired from teaching full time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did not return calls or an e-mail message yesterday seeking comment. In an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, he said he would be happy to meet Mr. Chávez.

Demand for the book seemed to be spread across the country. In Florida, Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, an independent bookseller with locations in Miami Beach, Coral Gables and Bal Harbour, said he had already ordered 50 more copies of “Hegemony,” while he usually keeps only about 3 per store. In Denver, Andrea Phillips, a manager at the Colfax Avenue branch of the bookseller the Tattered Cover, said “Hegemony” had sold three times as many copies this week as it normally would in a month.

On the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, Rainbow Books, a workers’ collective that specializes in leftist topics and carries many of Mr. Chomsky’s works, the last copy of “Hegemony” was sold on Thursday.

Allen Ruff, a manager at Rainbow Books, said “Hegemony” had not sold particularly well when it was first published three years ago, because many regulars were already familiar with Mr. Chomsky’s other works. But Mr. Ruff said the recent news media attention has meant that “people are now discovering him for the first time,” and the store has ordered a dozen more copies.

Mr. Chomsky’s publisher, Metropolitan Books, a unit of Henry Holt & Company, is printing an additional 25,000 copies of “Hegemony,” of which it said there are currently 250,000 in print in hardcover and paperback. A Holt spokeswoman said that print run could go higher after consultation with booksellers.

Up until now, the book, which Samantha Power, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2004, called “a raging and often meandering assault on United States foreign policy,” has been a steady seller but never hit the best-seller lists. To date it has sold about 66,000 copies in hardcover and nearly 55,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks bookstores and other outlets that usually account for 60 to 70 percent of a title’s sales.

Mr. Chomsky, 77, is hardly an obscure writer. Many people have heard of the outspoken professor, who is a darling of the left, even if they have not yet read his work. “I think Chávez speaking to it renewed interest and made people say, ‘I know that author and I’m going to check it out,’ ” said Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising at Barnes & Noble.

But Alan M. Dershowitz, the lawyer and Harvard Law School professor, said he doubted whether many of the current buyers would ever actually read the book.

“I don’t know anybody who’s ever read a Chomsky book,” said Mr. Dershowitz, who said he first met Mr. Chomsky in 1948 at a Hebrew-speaking Zionist camp in the Pocono Mountains where Mr. Dershowitz was a camper and Mr. Chomsky was a counselor.

“You buy them, you put them in your pockets, you put them out on your coffee table,” said Mr. Dershowitz, a longtime critic of Mr. Chomsky. The people who are buying “Hegemony” now, he added, “I promise you they are not going to get to the end of the book.”

He continued: “He does not write page turners, he writes page stoppers. There are a lot of bent pages in Noam Chomsky’s books, and they are usually at about Page 16.”

Regardless, most authors would be happy for a plug like Mr. Chávez’s. “All world leaders should be enlisted in book publicity,” said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster.

As a matter of fact, it is a growing trend. At a press conference in the East Room of the White House yesterday, Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, dodged a few questions by joking that Simon & Schuster, which is publishing his memoirs on Sept. 25, had barred him from commenting until his book is out. President Bush played along: “In other words, ‘Buy the book’ is what he’s saying,” Mr. Bush said.

David Callender contributed additional reporting from Madison, Wis.

servido por mydigest 1 comentario compártelo

Howard W. French: Chinese Children Learn Class, Minus the Struggle

SHANGHAI, Sept. 21 — Every weekday this summer, Rose Lei drove her daughter, Angelina, 5, to a golf complex at the edge of central Shanghai for a two-hour, $200 individual lesson with a teaching pro from Scotland.

But now that the school year has started, little Angelina will have to cut back on the golf, limiting herself to weekend sessions at a local driving range. In addition to her demanding school schedule, she will be attending private classes at FasTracKids, an after-school academy for children as young as 4 that bills itself as a junior M.B.A. program.

Ms. Lei, 35, a former information technology expert and the wife of a prosperous newspaper advertising executive, is part of a new generation of affluent parents here who are planning ways to cement their children’s place in a fast-emerging elite.

A generation ago, when people still dressed in monochromes and acquiring great wealth, never mind flaunting it, was generally illegal, the route to success was to join the right Communist Party youth organization or to attend one of the best universities.

Now the race starts early, with an emphasis not on ideology but on the skills and experiences the children will need in the elite life they are expected to lead. In addition to early golf training, which has become wildly popular, affluent parents are enrolling their children in everything from ballet and private music lessons, to classes in horse riding, ice-skating, skiing and even polo.

The intense interest in lifestyle training speaks not just to parents’ concern for their children’s futures but also to a general sense of social insecurity among China’s newly rich.

“These people are rich economically but lacking in basic manners, and they are not very fond of their own reputation,” said Wang Lianyi, an expert in comparative cultural studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing. Of the 35 million Chinese who traveled overseas last year, he said, many were shocked to discover that they were often viewed as having bad manners.

To address that, some of the newly affluent, like Ms. Lei, take their young children for extended stays overseas. London and New York are popular choices, because the children can get a head start on speaking Western-accented English.

Others are signing up for finishing schools popping up in China, which promise to train youngsters how to become proper ladies and gentlemen in the highest Western tradition.

The best known of these programs is run by a bluntly spoken Japanese woman, June Yamada, who charges about $900 for a two-week course that includes a brief stay at a five-star hotel here. Teenagers must bathe before dinner, take afternoon tea, wear formal dress and relearn how to walk, how to eat, how to dance and how to engage politely with members of the opposite sex.

“I don’t just teach them what to do and what not to do, I teach the girls how to be women, and the boys how to be men,” said Ms. Yamada, a former fashion writer who wrote a popular book on manners here. “We’re probably the most expensive school in Shanghai, but nobody is complaining and they keep coming back, so we must be doing something right.”

Ms. Yamada said she insisted that a parent attend the classes with any student she accepted, “because if the parent is spitting watermelon seeds or chicken bones right out of their mouth at home, what is the use of all the fine things we are teaching?”

It is hard to say how many Chinese have the money to lavish such attention on their children, but the limited number of surveys that have been done and anecdotal evidence indicate that the number is exploding.

Gao Ruxi of Shanghai Jiao Tong University conducted research in 2003 that showed that 15.4 percent of the city’s 17 million people — about 2.6 million — were rich enough to own a house and a vehicle.

Another report, from a Chinese research group called Horizon, estimated that in 2003 there were 569,000 families or individuals in Shanghai with liquid assets of at least $62,500.

FasTracKids, which started in Shanghai in 2004, has since opened two more outlets here and another in Guangzhou, and it is planning a fifth in Hangzhou.

The private program’s after-school sessions are held in brightly decorated classrooms, where fewer than a dozen children, typically 4 or 5 years old, are taught by as many as three teachers. The program emphasizes scientific learning, problem solving and, most attractively for many parents, assertiveness.

“Parents like myself are worrying about China becoming a steadily more competitive society,” said Zhong Yu, 36, a manufacturing supervisor whose wife is a senior accountant with an international firm and whose 7-year-old son has been enrolled in the junior M.B.A. classes. “Every day we see stories in the newspapers about graduates unable to find good jobs. Education in China is already good in the core subjects, but I want my son to have more creative thinking, because basic knowledge isn’t sufficient anymore.”

Mr. Zhong said that for all of their high salaries, he and his wife had very demanding jobs with little leisure time, and the bottom line for them was “wanting our son to have a better life than we have had.”

To some extent, the trend is driven by a collision of rising affluence and China’s one-child policy, which forces parents to focus all their energy and resources on a single child. But experts say there is more at work, that it reflects fear of a new kind of rat race, in which the entire society is hustling for advancement.

“At the top of the pyramid will be exceptionally strong graduates from top American or European universities who become a sort of ‘international freemen,’ ” said Qiu Huadong, an author and editor who has written about the new elite. “They work several years in China, and then they go abroad for a while, shifting locations every few years. At the bottom of the pyramid will be those who didn’t get such an outstanding education, and they’ll be sweating and bleeding for China and globalization.”

Other experts say that for many others, the grooming schools, study abroad and lessons in elite sports like golf and polo are as much about a gnawing sense of social insecurity as they are about getting ahead.

“Americans respect people who came from nothing and made something of themselves, and they also respect rich people,” Mr. Wang added. “In China, people generally don’t respect rich people, because there is a strong feeling that they are lacking in ethics. These new rich not only want money, they want people to respect them in the future.”

Indeed, some of the newly well-to-do have broadened their quest for respectability, enlisting their children in charity activities at the same time as they push them into classes aimed at getting them ahead.

Shan Lei, 31, a homemaker and former investment specialist whose husband is a shipping executive, said the family had invested $100,000 in a golf-club membership and had introduced her daughter to the sport, along with piano and skating lessons. They also manage to squeeze in charity work with AIDS orphans.

“Golf is played by the upper classes, but I want her to recognize there is social diversity,” said Ms. Lei, who is not related to Rose Lei. “I want her to care for others in the society.”

But there is little question that the driving force for most parents is the challenge of succeeding in an increasingly competitive society.

“My childhood was completely different from my daughter’s,” Rose Lei said. “We didn’t have things like FasTracKids or golfing, and that is why we want her to have those opportunities.” Asked if she had other motives, like ensuring that her daughter joins the ranks of China’s affluent class, she did not miss a beat. “Yes, this is very important,” she said.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Thomas L. Friedman: Anyone, Anything, Anywhere

The New Yorker once ran a cartoon by Peter Steiner of two dogs, with one sitting at a computer keyboard saying to the other, ''On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.''

Nobody also knows you're Uruguay.

A tiny country of three million people, wedged between Brazil and Argentina, Uruguay has come from nowhere to partner with India's biggest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services, to create in just four years one of the largest outsourcing operations in Latin America.

Yes, when Tata's Indian employees in Mumbai are asleep, its 650 Uruguayan engineers and programmers now pick up the work and help run the computers and backroom operations for the likes of American Express, Procter & Gamble and some major U.S. banks -- all from Montevideo.

How did this happen? One of the most interesting features of this era of globalization is how any entrepreneur -- with the right imagination, Internet bandwidth and a small amount of capital -- can assemble a global company by matching workers and customers from anywhere to do anything for anyone. Maybe the most important rule in today's increasingly flat world is this: Whatever can be done, will be done -- because so many people now have access to the tools of innovation and connectivity. The only question is: Will it be done by you or to you?

Gabriel Rozman decided it was going to be done by him. A retired partner from Ernst & Young who was raised in Uruguay, he hatched the idea of partnering with Tata to make Montevideo a global outsourcing hub. He did not have a single client or employee when he approached Tata. He had just two things: a gut instinct that Uruguay's quality education system had produced plenty of good, low-cost engineers and a gut desire to do something good for Uruguay -- the country that gave his Hungarian parents sanctuary from Hitler.

Four years later, TCS Iberoamerica can't hire workers fast enough. When I visited its head office, people were working on computers in hallways and stairwells. (Mr. Rozman also oversees 1,300 employees in Brazil and 1,200 in Chile.) It turns out that many multinationals like the idea of spreading out their risks and not having all their outsourcing done from India -- especially after one big U.S. bank nearly had to shut down last year when a flood in Mumbai paralyzed its India data center the same day a hurricane paralyzed its Florida operation. And there is no risk of nuclear war with Pakistan here.

''When I first approached this big U.S. bank to outsource some of its services to Montevideo, instead of India,'' recalled Mr. Rozman, ''the guy I was speaking with said, 'I don't even know where Montevideo is.' So I said to him, 'That's the point!' ''

Another factor, added Mr. Rozman, was that multinationals that were depending on Indian firms alone to run their backrooms 24 hours a day were getting the third team for eight hours, since the best Indian engineers didn't want to work the late-night shift -- the heart of America's day. By creating an outsourcing center in Montevideo, Tata could offer its clients its best Indian engineers during India's day (America's night) and its best Uruguayan engineers during America's day (India's night).

Most employees here are Uruguayans, but there are also lots of Indians sent over by Tata. It produces both a culture shock -- Montevideo doesn't even have an Indian restaurant -- and a cultural cacophony.

The firm runs on strict Tata principles, as if it were in Mumbai, so to see Uruguayans pretending to be Indians serving Americans is quite a scene. Said Rosina Marmion, 27, an Uruguayan manager, ''Our customers expect us to behave like Indians -- to react the same way.''

Also, Latin culture, unlike Indian, is very nonhierarchical. ''The Indians were not used to someone who says 'no,' '' explained Ricardo Zengin, 34, a systems analyst. But eventually, ''they understand that you are not saying it to challenge their authority but because you think it can be done better another way. In Latin culture, everything involves a discussion.''

Uruguayans tell a joke about themselves that goes: If you get diagnosed with a terminal illness, move to Uruguay immediately because everything happens 20 years later here.

In outsourcing, though, Uruguay has leapt ahead of its neighbors by being the first to understand what could be done -- that in today's world having an Indian company led by a Hungarian-Uruguayan servicing American banks with Montevidean engineers managed by Indian technologists who have learned to eat Uruguayan veggie is just the new normal.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Paul Krugman: Insurance Horror Stories

''When Steve and Leslie Shaeffer's daughter, Selah, was diagnosed at age 4 with a potentially fatal tumor in her jaw, they figured their health insurance would cover the bulk of her treatment costs.'' But ''shortly after Selah's medical bills hit $20,000, Blue Cross stopped covering them and eventually canceled her coverage retroactively.''

So begins a recent report in The Los Angeles Times titled ''Sick but Insured? Think Again,'' which offers a series of similar horror stories, and suggests that these stories represent a growing trend: more and more health insurers are finding ways to yank your insurance when you get sick.

This trend helps explain something that has been puzzling me: why is the health insurance industry growing rapidly, even as it covers fewer Americans?

Between 2000 and 2005, the number of Americans with private health insurance coverage fell by 1 percent. But over the same period, employment at health insurance companies rose a remarkable 32 percent. What are all those extra employees doing?

Now we know at least part of the answer: they're working harder than ever at identifying people who really need medical care, and ensuring that they don't get it. In the past, they mainly concentrated on screening out applicants likely to get sick. Now, it seems, they're also devoting a lot of effort to finding pretexts for revoking insurance after they've already granted it. They typically do this by claiming that they weren't notified about some pre-existing condition, even if the insured wasn't aware of that condition when he or she bought the policy.

Welcome to the ugly world of American health care economics.

Health care is poised to become America's largest industry. Employment in manufacturing, which once dominated the economy, has fallen 18 percent since 2000, to 14.2 million. Meanwhile, employment in the private health services industry has risen 16 percent, to 12.6 million. Another 1.3 million people are employed at government hospitals. So we're quickly approaching the point at which more Americans will be employed delivering health care than are employed producing manufactured goods.

Yet even as health care becomes the core of the American economy, our system of paying for health care remains sick, and is getting sicker.

Because everyone faces some risk of incurring huge medical costs, only the superrich can afford to be without health insurance. Yet private insurers try to refuse coverage to those most likely to need it, and deny payment whenever they can get away with it.

The point isn't that they're evil or greedy (although you do wonder how the people who cut off the Schaeffers can look themselves in the mirror). The fact is that cruelty and injustice are the inevitable result of the current rules of the game. Blue Shield of California is a nonprofit insurance provider, yet as a spokesman put it, if his organization doesn't follow the for-profit practice of selectively covering only the healthiest people, ''we will end up with all the high-risk people.''

Now, before you panic about the state of your own coverage, you should know that the horror stories in The Los Angeles Times article all involve individual insurance; if your coverage comes via your employer, you're reasonably secure against sudden cancellation.

But employment-based insurance is in rapid decline, as employers balk at the cost and more and more companies adopt Wal-Mart-style minimal-benefit policies. That's why many people are turning to individual insurance -- only to find out, in some cases, that they didn't get what they thought they paid for.

And here's the thing: it's all unnecessary.

Every other wealthy nation manages to provide almost all its citizens with guaranteed health insurance, while spending less on health care than we do. And there's no mystery why: we're paying the price for pointless, destructive reliance on private insurers. Medicare, which is a universal health insurance program for older Americans, spends less than 2 cents of every dollar on administrative costs, leaving 98 cents to pay for medical care. By contrast, private insurance companies spend only around 80 cents of each dollar in premiums on medical care; much of the remaining 20 cents is spent denying insurance to those who need it.

If we had a universal system -- Medicare for everyone -- there would be no more horror stories like those reported by The Los Angeles Times. And we'd almost certainly spend less on health care than we do now.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo

Thomas L. Friedman: Dumb as We Wanna Be

I asked Dr. Jose Goldemberg, secretary for the environment for Sao Paulo State and a pioneer of Brazil's ethanol industry, the obvious question: Is the fact that the U.S. has imposed a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to prevent Americans from importing sugar ethanol from Brazil ''just stupid or really stupid.''

Thanks to pressure from Midwest farmers and agribusinesses, who want to protect the U.S. corn ethanol industry from competition from Brazilian sugar ethanol, we have imposed a stiff tariff to keep it out. We do this even though Brazilian sugar ethanol provides eight times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it, while American corn ethanol provides only 1.3 times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it. We do this even though sugar ethanol reduces greenhouses gases more than corn ethanol. And we do this even though sugar cane ethanol can easily be grown in poor tropical countries in Africa or the Caribbean, and could actually help alleviate their poverty.

Yes, you read all this right. We tax imported sugar ethanol, which could finance our poor friends, but we don't tax imported crude oil, which definitely finances our rich enemies. We'd rather power anti-Americans with our energy purchases than promote antipoverty.

''It's really stupid,'' answered Dr. Goldemberg.

If I seem upset about this, I am. Development and environmental experts have long searched for environmentally sustainable ways to alleviate rural poverty -- especially for people who live in places like Brazil, where there is a constant temptation to log the Amazon. Sure, ecotourism and rain forest soap are nice, but they never really scale. As a result, rural people in Brazil are always tempted go back to logging or farming sensitive areas.

Ethanol from sugar cane could be a scalable, sustainable alternative -- if we are smart and get rid of silly tariffs, and if Brazil is smart and starts thinking right now about how to expand its sugar cane biofuel industry without harming the environment.

The good news is that sugar cane doesn't require irrigation and can't grow in much of the Amazon, because it is too wet. So if the Brazilian sugar industry does realize its plan to grow from 15 million to 25 million acres over the next few years, it need not threaten the Amazon.

However, sugar cane farms are located mostly in south-central Brazil, around Sao Paulo, and along the northeast coast, on land that was carved out of drier areas of the Atlantic rain forest, which has more different species of plants and animals per acre than the Amazon. Less than 7 percent of the total Atlantic rain forest remains -- thanks to sugar, coffee, orange plantations and cattle grazing.

I flew in a helicopter over the region near Sao Paulo, and what I saw was not pretty: mansions being carved from forested hillsides near the city, rivers that have silted because of logging right down to the banks, and wide swaths of forest that have been cleared and will never return.

''It makes you weep,'' said Gustavo Fonseca, my traveling companion, a Brazilian and the executive vice president of Conservation International. ''What I see here is a totally human dominated system in which most of the biodiversity is gone.''

As demand for sugar ethanol rises -- and that is a good thing for Brazil and the developing world, said Fonseca, ''we have to make sure that the expansion is done in a planned way.''

Over the past five years, the Amazon has lost 7,700 square miles a year, most of it for cattle grazing, soybean farming and palm oil. A similar expansion for sugar ethanol could destroy the cerrado, the Brazilian savannah, another incredibly species-rich area, and the best place in Brazil to grow more sugar.

A proposal is floating around the Brazilian government for a major expansion of the sugar industry, far beyond even the industry's plans. No wonder environmental activists are holding a conference in Germany this fall about the impact of biofuels. I could see some groups one day calling for an ethanol boycott -- a la genetically modified foods -- if they feel biofuels are raping the environment.

We have the tools to resolve these conflicts. We can map the lands that need protection for their biodiversity or the environmental benefits they provide rural communities. But sugar farmers, governments and environmentalists need to sit down early -- like now -- to identify those lands and commit the money needed to protect them. Otherwise, we will have a fight over every acre, and sugar ethanol will never realize its potential. That would be really, really stupid.

servido por mydigest sin comentarios compártelo